


Murderer's Row: Flashback - Two Sides of One Coin

by ViolentMedic



Series: Murderer's Row - Prison!AU [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prison, Animal Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 12:41:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4829522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViolentMedic/pseuds/ViolentMedic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, O'Malley was a small child who just wanted to pick up a beetle and crushed it by accident.</p><p>Once upon a time, Doc was a small child who found a bird who'd fallen out of a tree and broken its wing.</p><p>Once upon a time, one of these children later made a decision to hurt people, while the other made a decision to help them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Murderer's Row: Flashback - Two Sides of One Coin

**Author's Note:**

> For old readers, this was originally the O'Malley-only flashback titled "Reasoning." However, I realised I'd never written Doc any backstory, and the little backstory I came up with 1) was short and not enough to make its own flashback, and 2) had some parallels to O'Malley. So I renamed the flashback, added Doc's parts to it, and here it is.
> 
> For new readers, this will not be the only oneshot flashback. There are at least three more planned, but not for a while.
> 
> For readers of neither series, this is a past flashback of my prison!AU, Murderer's Row. This fic can be probably be understood without it, although it contains the occasional mild spoiler.

The first time O'Malley killed something, he was only four. Of course, it was nothing huge. It was just a beetle that he found under his bed.

It'd been a complete accident. O'Malley had just been sitting on the floor, holding it between his fingers and watching the legs wave around in the air frantically. And then a few moments after that... smoosh.

"Mamaaaaaa!"

His mother had been sitting on the couch, reading a magazine. She vaguely acknowledged her son tugging on her dress, but didn't look up.

"Mama! Mama! I finded a beetle! And it was making clicky noises, it was all, clicky clicky clicky! And then I picked it up and it was all swish and then I was holding it between my fingers and it was all swish and then—"

"Darling, your mother is trying to concentrate on something."

"But I can't put the beetle back together! It exploded! How do I put it back together?"

His mother blinked, then looked down at him over her magazine. She had a miniature freak out once she realised O'Malley had been tugging on her dress with hands that were covered in beetle guts, but once that freakout was over, she immediately dragged O'Malley to the bathroom to help him wash his hands.

"Hands under the water, okay?"

O'Malley put his hands behind his back. "But they have pieces of the beetle on them, and you need all the pieces to put him back together again."

"Look, sweetie... you can't put a beetle back together."

"Why not?"

"Because... look, wash your hands first." When O'Malley continued to hide his hands behind his back, his mother started singing. "It's fun to wash your hands, and I know you understand, so washy washy clean, scrub scrub!" She gently tugged his arms towards the sink, started helping him wash the gunk off. "We start by washing palm to palm, between each finger we must rub..."

"Now the back of the hands, it's such a simple plan..." O'Malley chimed in. He knew the hand-washing song by heart, his mother had been singing it to him for years.

"So washy washy clean, scrub scrub," they both sang together.

Once they had gone through the entire song, and his hands were nice and clean, O'Malley's mother sat him down on the couch to explain why it was impossible to put a beetle back together.

"You see, sweetie... you know how once you accidentally tore your teddy bear and the nanny stitched it back up?”

O'Malley nodded seriously.

"Well, that is because teddies only have fluff inside. Fluff is something that can be found easily and put back inside easy. You don't have to be an expert to sew up a teddy bear. Because all teddy bears need is fluff. But living people have lots of squishy parts on the inside. Like the heart and brain. They all need to be connected and working for living things to move and breathe and do all the fun things. But when a living thing is smooshed, then the smooshed parts stop working and the unsmooshed parts can't work without the rest."

"And then what?"

"And then they stop working for good. They die. Like Grandpa."

"Grandpa was smooshed?" O'Malley asked, looking alarmed.

"Well, not exactly. But parts of him stopped working. Smooshing just makes it happen faster."

"So... if one thing stops working, I will not work?" O'Malley asked, eyes wide.

"Well, not exactly. It doesn't happen to kids as much as grandpas. As long as they wash their hands and don't get nasty germs from smooshed bugs. Nasty germs sometimes make parts stop working. But sometimes people can be fixed if they get a bit smooshed. Doctors can fix people."

"Aren't you a doctor, mama?"

"No, I'm a nurse. It's different. Besides, not even doctors can fix bugs, because they're so tiny that we can't find a small enough needle to sew them up with." His mother nudged him. "Now go and play in your room, your mother wants to finish her magazine before your father gets home."

 

* * *

 

When Frank was four, he liked running around the streets and climbing things and a lot of adventurous activities that he grew out of as he got older. He remembered the excitement of climbing to the top of a tree and being able to see the whole world laid out before him.

Okay, he could see the whole street, but it felt like the whole world. It made him feel strong and important. He would find the highest branch and sit on it, swinging his legs and grinning.

The neighborhood children couldn't climb as high as him, or at least he didn't think so. He didn't talk to them much. Sometimes he tried, but they always ignored him. Or they listened to him once or twice, but then got tired of talking to him.

He'd thoroughly believed for a while that he had the ability to turn invisible. But no, that was just how the world worked.

Frank would spend all day outside. Running and climbing. Sometimes he traveled really far. Like, three whole blocks away. To him, that felt like an adventure. He found a little park nearby with a huge, old tree that was so much higher than any tree nearer to home. He climbed that tree instead.

Sometimes he'd stay out until it was dark. His parents never minded. They left food in the fridge for him if he wasn't home for dinner. Once he stayed out all night because he got lost, and when he got home they'd left his breakfast in the fridge, too.

When Frank was four, he found a bird that had fallen out of a tree and hurt its wing. He tried to put it back in the nest, and when it fell out again he took it home and tried to wrap up its wing so that it would heal and be able to fly again.

He didn't do a good job, and in retrospect likely put that bird through a lot of pain. Maybe even ended up killing it. But he didn't realise that at the time. He thought he was helping.

When he next saw his parents, he tried to show them the pet bird he now had—not realising that the bird wasn't moving all that much—and got waved off.

“Not now, Frank. Play somewhere else.”

There never did seem to be a now that was the right time for them.

Frank kept the bird for three days. It was gone from his room on the fourth day. He hadn't seen it go, and so he assumed that he'd done his job well, and didn't realise for years that his parents had just found the bird and, rather than talk to him about it, quietly removed it from his room while he was asleep.

Maybe that was the kinder thing to do, in this case. Frank had been happy about helping that bird for weeks.

 

* * *

 

A few days after he first killed a bug, O'Malley found another beetle. This time, he squished it on purpose because he wanted to see all the squishy insides. He couldn't see them, though. He just saw gunk. He thought maybe he wasn't smooshing them right, so for the next few months he kept trying to squish bugs. He could never really see the insides that his mother talked about. He didn't ask her about it again, instead just making sure he washed his hands every time he smooshed a bug so she wouldn't get angry.

Eventually, he gave up trying to see beetle insides and forgot about it until he was about seven years old, when he was wandering around outside. He wasn't really supposed to wander out of the house without the nanny's permission, but she had told him it was too hot to go outside without a hat and since he'd lost his hat he wasn't allowed to go outside. He had decided that it was a stupid rule.

It wasn't the first time he'd run off from the nanny. The nanny would complain to his parents, but they would dismiss it as 'boyish shenanigans.'

He'd been running around the street, dragging his pink teddy bear along with him, when he found a dead bird. One that had probably hit the electrical wires above. O'Malley tilted his head and prodded it with his foot, before making a mock gasp of shock and holding his teddy bear near it.

"Oh no! The birdie got shocked! It needs to go to hospital and see Dr. Strawberry!" he said, changing his voice to sound more gruff and bear-like. "Into the ambulance! Whooooooo, whooooooo!" He picked up the dead, stiff bird and started running back to the house, waving his teddy bear around like an airplane. "Zoom zoom, whooooooo!”

His nanny hadn't taken the fact that he brought a dead bird into the house well. She immediately took it from him and threw it in the bin, before locking him inside his room. O'Malley hadn't been happy about it. He'd looked forward to pretending he and his teddy were doctors. And if he could never see an insect's guts because they were tiny, he'd be able to see the ones a bird had. They would have been bigger.

Stupid nanny ruining his interests.

O'Malley couldn't find another dead bird. And he couldn't catch a live one. Too difficult. But while he'd been confined to his room, he'd been looking out the window. He'd seen the cat that lived next door. An old, fat, cranky cat that always scratched him when he went near it.

No-one would miss a nasty cat like that.

Catching it had been hard, because it kept scratching him. He'd had to hide the cat in the garden shed overnight before going inside, and even then his mother had been concerned with the amount of scratches he had on his arms. Stupid cat.

But kitty insides were much more interesting than bug insides. He could actually see the bits and pieces. It was awesome. Much more interesting than the medical books his mother had. O'Malley had looked at the pictures in those and it had been boring. Especially boring when compared to real insides.

One cat just wasn't enough to satisfy the little boy's curiosity about animal insides. About how they worked and which parts you could smoosh without the animal dying. He found a lot of animals over the next couple of months. That's how long he lasted before someone found out. His parents didn't use the garden shed except for stashing random stuff that they wanted out of the way. But once he stayed in there too long and the nanny came to check on him.

 

* * *

 

"Dr. Strawberry, you may make the incision into the pink thing over there," O'Malley said, waving the teddy bear around, while holding the knife in the other hand. "And then we will—"

"Are you in there?"

O'Malley yelped a little at the interruption, and the hammering on the wooden door. "I'll be out in a minute! I was just looking for something! I left my teddy in here!" Which was true, sometimes O'Malley left his teddy bear in there to 'guard the patients.'

"Why would you leave it in the shed?"

O'Malley only had enough time to shove his newest patient, a raccoon, in a box before the shed door swung open.

"You wander off so much... I should be getting paid for every time I have to find you," she muttered under her breath. Then she frowned, wrinkled her nose. "Smells awful in here."

"Yes, it does. So we should go now." O'Malley tugged on her hand. "I don't like it in here, I was just finding my teddy bear."

The nanny didn't move. "Smells... rotten." Her eyes narrowed. "You didn't bring in another dead bird, did you?"

"No," O'Malley said truthfully. "Can we leave now?"

It was dark in the shed. Which was probably why it took the nanny a while to notice the bloodstains. And the bloodstains, unfortunately, led straight to the box O'Malley kept his 'patients' in. A box that he hadn't really cleaned out since he started on animals.

There was a lot of screaming. O'Malley thought the nanny was being kind of a wuss about it, honestly. It was just a few dead animals. Even if a couple of them weren't really recognisable as cats anymore. Still. No different from carving up a turkey.

The nanny immediately quit after that, but not before telling O'Malley's parents all about it. Telling them that their kid needed help. They did listen to her. But afterwards, once she had left for good, they asked O'Malley why he had all the dead animals in the first place.

O'Malley lied and said they were already dead, and that he was trying to put them back together again. His parents believed him. Or at least they pretended to. It hurt a lot less to dismiss O'Malley's behavior as more 'boyish shenanigans' instead of admitting that he liked to cut apart animals for funsies. They never told anyone else, just made him promise not to do it again.

O'Malley was a bit more discreet after that. And it didn't take too long for O'Malley to get bored with animals. People were much more interesting. Which was why, when he got older, O'Malley became a surgeon.

 

* * *

 

Frank liked helping animals, but they were very hard to catch so he didn't try all that much. Mostly he just kept climbing trees and running around and staying out far too late, but there was no 'too late' for his parents, or at least they'd never told him what too late was.

When he started school, he thought maybe he'd make friends this time. Sometimes he thought he did. He'd find a group, and they'd let him in, but then a few days later they'd start avoiding him at best or making fun of him at worse. He talked too much or he was too squeaky or he looked funny or he was too goodie-goodie. He was annoying and stupid and there always seemed to be a different reason. 

When Frank still liked adventure, liked climbing trees and playing in the rougher places, in exploring and running around the streets, he used to earn a lot of scrapes and cuts. And so it became habit for him to carry around a box of band-aids wherever he went. Purple band-aids with happy cartoon animals on them. He carried a box in his pocket at all times.

He'd done so since he was a little kid, and he'd tripped on the road outside and wandered up to his mother with a badly scraped knee, and she'd said 'go ask your father to help with that,' and then his father had said 'go ask your mother.' He hadn't wanted to bother either of them again, so he'd just sat in his room and let it sting, because he couldn't reach the band-aids by himself.

One day, at the age of seven, he was watching the other kids play tag.

He'd asked to join, but they'd said no because Frank always protested that tag was so competitive, and wouldn't it be much more fun to just run together without all this pushing and touching? So Frank watched instead.

There had been a boy, a bigger boy with fluffy brown hair, who had been 'it.' He'd been running after one of the girls, who'd been much faster than him. Frank was watching quietly. And then the boy's foot caught on something and he tripped.

He scraped his knee up really badly. It was dripping blood, and this big, tough kid cried. Some of the other kids showed sympathy, but didn't want to get too close. A couple thought that him crying was funny. The girl he'd been chasing had tried to help him up, but he said it hurt too much. So she ran to find a teacher.

Frank had a pocketful of band-aids, and squashed his way through the crowd of children. He told the kid, in his best doctor voice—he'd seen doctors on the television—to sit still, that he was going to make it all better. He slapped on several band-aids—it had been a really big scrape—and then managed to talk the kid into managing to get to his feet.

The big kid had grinned at him later and let him play tag with them for a whole week.

During that week, they'd started calling him 'Doc' and it stuck.

He'd helped, and suddenly he hadn't been so annoying. At least not for a little while. They'd liked him. He'd been important.

And that was when Frank 'Doc' DuFresne decided he wanted to be a doctor for real.

 

* * *

 

When they met in prison so many years later, Doc would express a disbelief that O'Malley could ever apply to be a surgeon without wanting to help people. But it wasn't that. It wasn't a desire to hurt people, either. That came later. It was just because O'Malley loved seeing how people ticked. He liked studying the nuts and bolts of the full, fleshy machine.

When he was a proper, legal surgeon, he never killed a patient on purpose. After all, that'd be incredibly stupid. They kept records, they'd get suspicious if too many people died when he worked. If he kept killing people, they wouldn't let him work on the more interesting cases. If they let him continue being a surgeon at all.

So, when on the job, he stayed a good, professional surgeon. Putting on a likable, charming personality was easy in those days. No-one suspected a thing. There was no reason to, at first. He wasn't doing anything illegal all through college and med school. When he became a surgeon, it turned out he was pretty good at it. For a couple of years, it was all well and good.

But newbie surgeons didn't get the most interesting operations. Sometimes he got to watch, sure, but it wasn't quite the same. Being a surgeon was an interesting job and he wouldn't trade it for any other occupation. But he got antsy. He got bored. And when O'Malley got bored, his mind immediately started working on things that would make him less bored.

Cutting people apart was the thing he found most interesting, and the restrictions on how much he could cut was what annoyed him most. Was it really that much of a surprise that he turned to cutting apart other people? Cutting apart healthy strangers?

The idea came into his head a long time before he went through with it. Just a year after he started work, just after his internship ended. It was just one stray thought. O'Malley had been standing outside the operating room, washing his hands and frustrated that he was stuck on another appendectomy. Just cutting off a useless piece of flesh. Cutting exactly where they told him.

And there was just that one stray thought.

 _They wouldn't be able to tell me where to cut if I found someone outside the hospital and..._ The thought didn't even really finish before O'Malley interrupted the thought with: _Don't think about that. It's a stupid idea._ He returned to washing his hands.

The thought never really left him, though. Any time he got bored, that thought returned. The thought of just wandering into the nastier part of the city, the part filled with the homeless and criminals. The areas filled with the junk of human society. People that wouldn't be missed. Just finding someone, dumping them in the trunk of his car, dragging them home and—

He entertained the thought for eighteen months before going through with it.

It started with just random homeless people. They were usually just sleeping in the gutters, and the majority of them were probably diseased or starving, not enough strength to really put up a struggle. He'd always grab them at night, obviously. If anyone ever saw him bundling a homeless man or woman into the trunk of his car, they never reported it. Not that O'Malley was aware of, anyway.

At first it was just the fascination with the body. With the nuts and bolts. It started like that. The first person he kidnapped was an old man. Beard covering the majority of his face, dressed in rags. Typical aging hobo.

He'd actually used anesthetic for him. He hadn't been interested in the pain. He'd just wanted to really have a proper look at all the organs. All of them, not just the ones other people told him to cut. And this hobo had some funky stuff going on in his stomach. It was really quite fascinating.

The second and third ones had gone the same way. Out for the entire procedure. They'd died quietly in their sleep, even if it was because someone had been shoving a scalpel into them while they were napping.

The fourth one would have been the same, except that O'Malley had been low on anesthetic (which he'd pilfered from the hospital to begin with) and taken a bit too long with cutting apart their kidneys. They'd woken up in the middle of it, just as O'Malley was reflecting on the fact that this person was probably a heavy smoker. They'd started screaming, writhing around, making a big mess of things before O'Malley quickly slashed their throat to shut them up.

He regretted it immediately afterwards. Because when the man under the knife started screaming... this wave of exhilaration just crashed through O'Malley. It'd been the most thrilled about anything that O'Malley had felt in his life. Just a massive surge of pure excitement.

He never used anesthetic again, although he remembered to muffle them before he started. No two people reacted quite the same to the pain. It was so fascinating that O'Malley wondered countless times why he had waited so long to start killing properly.

Since he wasn't bound by hospital rules, he didn't have to wear plastic gloves. He could feel the texture of the organs and the feel of the liquids without any plastic blocking the sensations. But even so, he always scrubbed his hands clean before and afterwards. Old habits die hard, and that'd been a habit ever since he was a little kid. Washy washy clean, scrub scrub.

 

* * *

 

Doc tried to become a doctor. He tried so hard.

But whoever said that every dream comes true, that as long as you really try you'll succeed… well, Doc liked to be optimistic, but whoever said that was just plain wrong.

There were so many problems. Not being able to deal with the expenses. Failing class after class no matter how hard he studied. Everyone struggled, but most of them managed. Doc couldn't manage. He didn't have a social life, so it's not as if he didn't have time to study, but he'd keep waking up from using his schoolbooks as a pillow and not remembering anything, and that was when he wasn't working to try and keep himself afloat.

He thought about asking his parents for financial help when things got rough, or even just calling them and telling him about his problems and hoping they might show a little sympathy, but he didn't want to bother them.

The information just never stuck. And eventually, he failed one too many classes. Stacked up too much debt.

He didn't even make it through pre-med.

He still wanted to be a doctor—that was all he'd ever wanted to be, apart from a brief period where he'd wanted to be a superhero but hadn't been able to find enough radiation—so, in between working to try and pay off the debt he'd racked up at college, he took some first aid classes. Because it was something. He did a little better at those.

A couple of years passed, with him just taking the occasional class on this and that. But he wasn't doing what he wanted to do. He wasn't helping people. He wasn't making them happy. And no-one was looking at him like he was… anything.

And then…

When Doc was twenty-two, everything changed due to Sarge's bizarre way of hiring medical professionals.

One day, Doc was on his way to work as a waiter. He stopped at a crossing and waited for the little green man to pop up so he could cross. On the pole next to him, above the button for the crossing, was a bunch of notices with the phone numbers printed in tags down the bottom. Most of them were the usual. Classes on random things. Roommates needed.

And then, for a reason known only to Sarge, he'd stuck a notice up of his own.

 

_MEDICAL ASSISTANTS NEEDED AT VALHALLA PENITENTIARY._

_ARE YOU INTERESTED IN TREATING THE DREGS OF HUMAN SOCIETY? THEN LOOK NO FURTHER! POSITIONS AVAILABLE! THE PAY IS OKAY. THE INMATES ARE HOOLIGANS. BE PREPARED FOR ATTACK AT ANY MOMENT OF THE DAY._

_LOVERS OF THE COLOUR BLUE MAY NOT APPLY._

 

It was not, exactly, the most professional job listing that Doc had ever seen. But it caught his eye anyway. Perhaps it wasn't what he'd always dreamed of. When he'd thought about being a doctor—being a real doctor—he hadn't imagined caring for prisoners.

But it was something.

It was better than what he was doing.

So Doc took one of the tags with Sarge's number on it, and he called and asked for an interview, and just… quietly left out the part about him not having a medical degree.

Sarge hired him after making sure Doc wasn't 'a dirty Blue.' He grumbled a bit about the colour purple, but didn't seem to consider it such a crime. Doc was taken on as a medical assistant, working underneath a different doctor.

Barely a month in, that doctor quit and Sarge hadn't wanted to find anyone else, and Doc was suddenly the head and only doctor of the entire prison.

He hadn't known what to make of that.

 

* * *

 

O'Malley's crimes went on for many years. Homeless people and random criminals weren't enough, once he became interested in the reactions. He found victims all over the place. All of them different. It was more interesting when the victims didn't have beard covering their faces. It was easier to see their expressions that way.

Countless people went under O'Malley's knife. Among the people he tried to kill and torture, only two ever escaped, the first of whom was Church. The second one led to him eventually getting found out, though it had really been a streak of bad luck. What were the odds that he and his escaped victim shopped at the same store?

When he was finally caught, more than twenty years after he started—he was fifty when he was finally caught—he was thrown in prison. When he was first arrested, he was interrogated as to why he killed so many people. Trying to figure out if there was a reason behind all the killing. Barring the fact that most of the early victims were homeless, none of his victims really had anything in common.

 

* * *

 

“Why did you do it? Why did you kill so many people?”

Less than two years after O'Malley getting caught, a few months after Doc took the job, Doc finally had a peek at O'Malley's files, and while he was examining O'Malley's broken arm—an injury that had been caused by Caboose lashing out at him—he asked the question so many had.

O'Malley grinned at him and shrugged. The same response he'd given to all the interrogators, all the cops, everyone who'd ever asked.

“Why do you try to help so many?” he countered.

“It's the right thing to do.”

“But is that why you do it?”

 

* * *

 

O'Malley did what he did because it was fun. Because it kept him amused. Because it was interesting. Because it gave him a thrill like nothing else did. At his core, he didn't hate his victims. If anything, he liked them more than most.

Doc did what he did because he wanted them to like him. He wanted to help them because when he succeeded, they liked him for that moment. And affecting someone positively like that made him feel like, for once, he was worth something.

If helping people had given O'Malley a thrill—because what wasn't thrilling in cheating death and bringing life—and Doc had found a sense of importance in hurting people—because what was more important in a person's life than the person who ended it—would it have been different?


End file.
